Every so often I have this urge (maybe more of an itch) to spend hours and hours on the web trying to find information about old, obsolete computers of the past. I am intrigued by the XEROX Alto and Star ('70s-'82), the Apple Lisa ('83) and, of course, CRAYs ('75-ish). These were revolutionary machines indeed, they wrote golden pages in the history of computing. In the end of the 1980s, a new innovative product was ready to ship, created by a bunch of people coming from Apple: The NeXT platform.

NeXT's price stratosphere was significantly higher than present day Mac's, even without inflation. In 1988 when the original NeXT computer was released, it cost $10,000 a piece, or $6000 for college students. Yes it included a lot of things, including a laser printer, however that price is simply too high. It's extremely high pricing is more comparable to the Lisa than to modern day Macs. With the slabs their prices started getting more reasonable, but were still not in the desktop range, however their target market were workstations not desktops at the time.